Read Novel Full Chapter 451: The Gods Descend
Chapter 451: The Gods Descend
Darkness, damp, and rot. This was the lowest deck of the ship's hold.
The ceramic figurine now faced the hardest choice of its entire life. More than that, it was the first choice it had ever made for itself.
For a long while it hesitated. Then its eyes dropped to the floor.
There lay the very thing it had turned up earlier, while searching for the Stone Carving of Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo.
The Eye of Divine Oracle.
Once again, at the critical moment, it placed everything in the hands of a god's will.
It picked up the Eye of Divine Oracle and cradled it in both hands.
"Eye of Divine Oracle, bring me the will of the gods once more! Guide me one more time!"
"Master. Tell me what I am to do."
Deep beneath the layered disguise of nesting dolls and false skins, the shattered ceramic doll buried at its innermost core stirred awake, and a small fragment drifted loose from its "body."Carefully, it fed its own "flesh and blood" to the Eye of Divine Oracle, hoping it would grant guidance once more.
The relief on the metal casing slowly began to writhe and shift. The monstrous shape worked into it swallowed the fragment whole, and its innate power woke.
Light flared, flooding the dark chamber.
It seemed about to carry the ceramic figurine into that strange world of Spirituality, into the domain where the Authority of Spirituality lay within reach.
But the instant the light swept across its eye, it stopped dead.
The light died, and a sharp, brittle sound rang through the dark chamber.
Crack!
The ceramic figurine lowered its head. The crack in the Eye of Divine Oracle was spreading, ring by ring, all the way around.
Whether the old wound it had taken before had simply given out here, or whether the thing had been broken all along and it had only kept forcing use out of it again and again, there was no telling.
The metal spyglass snapped clean in two.
Hiss!
For an instant the ceramic figurine's expression froze.
Only the corner of its mouth kept twitching.
A long moment passed. Then the ceramic figurine pushed itself unsteadily to its feet, turned away from the Teleportation Gate, and left the damp lowest deck behind.
It climbed the wooden ladder rung by rung, up to the window on the deck above.
Voices carried down from the deck overhead and in through the window.
"Move it."
"We're taking the west side today."
"We catch that monster, and every one of us collects the King's reward."
"Riches, titles, it's all right here."
It was the shouting of navy sailors, their voices thick with restlessness and greed.
Anu had left, but the search went on all the same. Every man still carried out his orders to the letter.
Gripping the Stone Carving of Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo, the ceramic figurine thrust it out through the window.
"If they catch me, I'll have truly nothing left. Not even the Divine Treasury."
"If they catch me, my master's mission will never be finished."
"I can't die."
"I mustn't die."
"And I mustn't let them catch me."
Over and over the ceramic figurine repeated the words, until at last it had talked itself into it. Then it loosened its grip and let the stone slab fall into the sea below.
The ship sailed on, and the stone slab was drawn slowly away into the current.
Drained of strength, the ceramic figurine slumped beneath the window and curled into a tight ball.
As if it feared someone might catch sight of it through the window.
It clutched its head, and its voice came out pale and drained of everything. "This was all I could do."
"Master, this was all I could do."
Aboard the White Tower Alliance's Alchemy Ship
Three apostles had gathered, and once the ritual prayer was done, Oran was the first to call upon the power of the miracle tool, More Than Just a Compass.
A wash of colored light poured out, and the compass rose into the air, floating free.
Within the colored glow the needle turned, slow and steady, before finally coming to rest on a single point.
But it pointed toward Ruhe Beast Island, where the old white round tower of the Land of Sunrise had once stood.
"On Ruhe Beast Island?" Sukob asked, doubtful.
The Earth Witch shook her head. "That is impossible."
A moment later, the colored needle of light swung around to point somewhere else entirely, toward the Sky Miracle Garden.
Oran gave a slightly awkward smile and said, with something like apology, "No. It is pointing somewhere else entirely."
"It seems my heart is in some disorder for the moment. My longing for the stone carving does not run deep enough. It is not where my heart truly lies."
Oran turned to the Earth Witch and Sukob and raised a hand, asking which of them wished to try.
Sukob studied the compass and shook his head as well.
He could not say for certain where his own heart truly lay. Too many longings pulled at him at once. To become a god, to see contract lawyers spread across the whole world, to see the God of Knowledge and Truth awaken, and on and on.
It was then that the Earth Witch, Metel, spoke up. "Then let me try!"
The Earth Witch did not carry the same weight of goals and ideals as the other two. She had once been a blind girl, without family of her own.
She had lived alone in the temple, giving everything of herself to the divine.
What she wanted, then, was simpler and purer than anything the other two carried.
She did not seek to become a god. If she had an ideal at all, it was only to guard the Mountain of Life's Origin and the Land of Ten Thousand Serpents.
If she held a single longing above all others, it was to see more witches rise, so that the eyes of the Ruhe Great God might spread across the whole island, watching together over the Life Sovereign's garden among mortals.
And all of that depended on that one stone carving.
The Earth Witch stepped forward and took up the compass. She composed herself for a moment, then repeated the same prayer Oran had spoken.
The only difference was that she clasped the compass between both hands.
"Compass."
"Treasure of the God of Demon Spirits, Elena. A miracle born in accordance with the Laws of Creation."
"Follow my heart. Point me to the greatest longing I hold in this moment."
"Guide me. Guide me to the way that fulfills the longing in my heart."
As Metel finished speaking, the compass clasped between her hands blazed with a light far greater than before.
She opened her hands, and the gazes of the other two apostles turned toward her at once, drawing with them the attention of everyone aboard the ship.
The compass spun wildly, then all at once fell still.
It pointed, unwavering, toward the sea to the south.
Just then several wind lizard dragons came in from the distance. It was the lizard person, Anu. Pontiff Menro of the Temple of Fire Protection had come as well, sailing in aboard the Fire Guardians. Both had received word from Oran.
Anu stood for the King and the crown, Menro for the temple and divine authority. Together the two of them represented the will of Suinhor itself.
If Oran meant to carry his search into Suinhor's own waters, there was a proper process to be followed.
Anu rode atop his wind lizard dragon. The moment he and the others arrived, they caught sight of the light bursting from the Earth Witch's hands.
Anu guessed it in an instant. "You have already found it?"
The alchemy-artifact ships, the divine-technique-artifact ships, and every other vessel in their company turned together and swept out toward the waters of Suinhor.
Aboard the alchemy ship and the Fire Guardians alike, heads crowded the decks, every one of them alive with anticipation.
So much manpower, so many resources spent, and today, at last, they would find that monster.
They meant to see with their own eyes just what kind of creature this monster truly was, and whether it really carried a divine artifact.
The lizard person, Anu, flew above and watched the fleet arrive at the very stretch of sea he himself had been searching.
"Sure enough. It is here, exactly where I guessed."
The alchemy ship cut through the water, throwing up wave after wave of white foam, and at last came to rest above a stretch of sea that looked, on its surface, entirely unremarkable.
Oran, Sukob, and Metel stood at the bow. Oran, as the one who had called this gathering together, looked first to the compass in the Earth Witch's hands, then out toward the sea not far ahead.
"So it hides right here?"
"No, that is not it, is it?"
"There is no person hiding here. There is a thing."
Oran stepped calmly down from the bow. His form blurred into a streak of fire that skimmed across the water's surface before plunging straight down into the sea.
BOOM!
The sea split open as though torn apart, a wound driving straight down into the depths.
Oran stood inside the torn-open water and watched a stone slab rise slowly from the tangled, layered plants at the bottom of the sea and settle into his hand.
Even an apostle like Oran could not mask the excitement that gripped him now. His voice shook with feeling.
"A holy relic of the First Era."
"The most ancient of kings."
"The union of a divine child and a divine messenger."
"A myth of the primordial age."
Oran had laid eyes on treasures of every kind, and had learned secrets the world kept hidden in every corner. But none of it compared to what he now held in his hand.
Yet the instant Oran took the Stone Carving of Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo into his grasp, a light rose from within his eyes.
In that same moment, the entire Dream Starry Sea stirred to life. Countless ancient Dreams, the oldest spirits of all, cried out together in one voice.
It was more than a cry. It was a curse.
The voice of a god carried across a distant kingdom and poured into Oran's consciousness. "Do not look! Oran!"
Oran turned, and found that his consciousness had already arrived in the Sky Miracle Garden.
He stood in a sea of blossoms, the Cup of Desire flowering all around him. At the far edge of that kingdom rose the towering Gate of Mythology, and before it, a god holding a lamp aloft looked down upon him.
"God Iva!" Oran cried, his mind reeling.
The instant the gaze of the God of Desire and Alchemy met Oran's own, Oran's body back in the mortal world was already caught in the grip of an overwhelming transformation.
His form began to shift, taking on a shape not unlike a spirit's, yet touched with something else, a slightly different, mythic cast.
His body swelled without end, throwing off light in every direction, boundless.
A colossal shadow of the god appeared at the center of the sea, its grip closing tight around the stone slab.
No mortal eye could make out its true form. All they could see was a figure holding a single lamp aloft, staining the whole world a blazing white.
Across that whole stretch of sea, every soul stood frozen, staring up at the deity as it towered above the ocean.
"A god descends!" The cry tore from every throat at once.
Aboard the Fire Guardians, Menro was no exception. At the sight of the god, he too was struck half out of his senses. "The God of Desire and Alchemy has come down in person. Then the Goddess must be coming soon as well."
The lizard people atop their wind lizard dragons could only gaze at Anu in open reverence. "Chief, a god really has come down!"
The God of Desire and Alchemy turned his gaze upon the stone carving. There the ancient queen sat crowned before Yesael Palace, the Yinsai Scepter in her hand, and behind her stood a bright-smiling young man, his eyes fixed ahead, as though he were gazing straight through the carving at the God of Alchemy himself.
"Queen Star!"
"Lord Polo!"
Iva gazed at the young man in the carving and could not keep the words in. "You are exactly as you were painted in the Pyramid Temple."
No one understood the origin of these two figures, or all that they had done, better than Iva did.
Queen Star had created the God-Descending Technique. It was the very prototype of the divine technique by which Iva was descending here now.
More than that, the God-Descending Technique was what let the Creator's will truly reach down into this world from beyond the universe.
Divine Messenger Polo was the first Dream Sovereign, the Creator's youngest son, and it was he who had brought the Dream Realm itself into being.
The God of Desire and Alchemy's descent upon the sea set off something like a chain reaction.
In the blink of an eye, a passage opened within the void.
Beyond it, a colossal Demon Spirit Pyramid revealed itself, and at its summit, an ancient temple flickered faintly in and out of sight.
A deity cloaked in a robe, gripping the Ruhe Sword, looked out from that passage into the mortal world, carrying with her a killing chill so fierce it stirred a cold wind across the surface of the sea.
The moment she appeared, the light pouring from the compass blazed brighter still.
The God of Demon Spirits had opened a gateway from the Dream Realm, peering through it into the waking world.
Her gaze came to rest at last on the stone slab in the God of Desire and Alchemy's grasp. "So it truly is that stone carving."
Above the storm-wracked clouds at the edge of the sky, the Kingdom of Knowledge itself began to rise into view. The Ghost, Polik, who commanded the Door of Truth, watched from across that vast and boundless sea, and confirmed it. The Stone Carving of Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo had truly returned to the world.
At last, blood-red waves rose across the sea.
Endless red gathered in from every direction, condensing into the true shadow of a demon god. The hem of her crimson robe merged with the ocean itself, stretching all the way to the edge of the sky.
The towering body of the demon god rose to meet the heavens, standing face to face with God Iva.
The Scarlet Goddess had arrived as well.
The gods had descended.
Every soul of Suinhor present fell prostrate at once. Menro, seeing a god for the very first time, trembled all over with excitement, tears filling his eyes.
"Oh, God!"
"Look, quickly! Our God stands right here!"
"God has descended, descended here upon the very sea!"
The ceramic figurine leaned into the corner of the ship's hold, half its head poking out of the round window to look outside.
It was all some distance off by now. A long while had passed since the ceramic figurine let the stone carving fall, and the ship had already run a great way.
So the ordinary soldiers and low-ranking ability users aboard the ship had no idea what was happening in the distance.
All they could make out, faintly, was a pillar of light shooting up into the sky, a deep, endless crimson blanketing the horizon, and a storm somewhere beyond.
The men aboard thought a storm was rolling in, and shouts of alarm rose across the deck. "A storm's coming in!"
"Get us moving, quick!"
"More speed!"
Only the ceramic figurine saw clearly what was truly happening out there, and knew exactly who had come.
"The Scarlet Goddess!"
"The God of Monsters and Demon Spirits!"
"The God of Desire and Alchemy."
"The God of Knowledge and Truth."
One after another it named these beings silently in its mind, not daring to speak a single one aloud, though its teeth had already begun to chatter on their own.
It shut its eyes and whispered, barely a breath of sound, "You've all found it now. You've all got what you wanted."
"Hurry up and go!"
"Hurry up and go!"
The Stone Carving of Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo had been found. On the surface, the gods' most important purpose here had been fulfilled, and everything should have ended there.
But the Scarlet Goddess had no intention of letting it end so easily. She still had another purpose of her own.
She meant to reclaim a holy relic the Temple of Truth had lost two hundred and fifty million years ago.
The Scarlet Goddess turned her gaze from the Stone Carving of Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo to the mouth of the passage hanging in the sky, toward the God of Demon Spirits who guarded the ancient Yinsai Temple.
She spoke, in the trilobite men's own tongue, the Wisdom Language. "Lady Elena. Might I make use of your Miracle Compass for a moment?"
Beneath the God of Demon Spirits' hood, two faces, one real and one illusory, opened together and spoke with a single voice. "Once, I asked you a question much like that myself."
The Scarlet Goddess fell silent. At last she said, "At the time, I had no choice either."
What followed was a silence longer still.
In the end, the God of Demon Spirits raised her hand and drew the compass across to hover before the Scarlet Goddess.
She knew what the Scarlet Goddess meant to do, what she was searching for.
"If Lan were still alive, he too would want the Final Chapter back, the one his teacher left atop the lighthouse."
No one else could make sense of what the two divine beings were saying to one another. To their ears it hardly sounded like speech at all, more like the sound of thunder splitting the sky.
As though it were the Language of Law itself, divine law and the mandate of heaven.
But the ceramic figurine understood every word. It knew both the Wisdom Language and the Wisdom Script.
"She wants the Saint's Chapter."
It was nothing like the Stone Carving of Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo.
This object meant something entirely different to the Temple of Truth, and something entirely different again to the Evil God of Original Sin, Xiao.
The ceramic figurine, of course, knew exactly what this object was. Xiao had come from the Temple of Truth, once a student under the Second-generation Sage of Truth.
Xiao murdered his own teacher, Lan, and carried off every one of Lan's possessions from the island. With his own hand, he even took the Final Chapter, the one the First-generation Sage of Truth, Sandean, had left atop the lighthouse.
Legend held that this Final Chapter set down in full how the first-generation Saint, the Great Poet Tito, journeyed to the God-Given Land to seek an audience with the Creator. It marked the very beginning of the age that carried the trilobite men out of the era of the Royal Bloodline, out of the age when the Great Beast itself had been the throne, and into the dawn of the Age of Miracles.
It was the First-generation Sage of Truth, Sandean, who carried the Final Chapter to the Divine Kingdom of Creation and brought miracles down into the mortal world.
Hands trembling, the ceramic figurine drew out the Bone Book.
It was a bone book ground from trilobite man bone-armor, bound together with cords woven from plants of some ancient age. It looked crude beyond measure, steeped in the weathered rawness of the primordial past.
And yet the light of a divine artifact shimmered across its surface, pulsing in a rhythm both sacred and devout.
Listen closely.
Echoing within it were generation after generation of the Temple of Truth's disciples, singing epics and hymns, crying out the names of saints and sages.
But by now the ceramic figurine had gone numb. It probably did not even know, itself, what it should do next.
The ceramic figurine did not know which way led out.
Perhaps it could feel it too. Its own death was drawing close.
Everything it had done until now had been nothing more than clinging to one more breath.
Even now, if it could buy itself one more instant, even half a turn of the hourglass more, it would take that gladly.
It held the Bone Book and studied it a while. Then, as though it had suddenly gone mad, it hurled the book out through the window.
"Go on, then!"
"Take it. It's all yours."
"It's all yours, every last one of you."
The Scarlet Goddess took hold of the miracle tool, More Than Just a Compass. She did not go through the same elaborate ritual the other apostles had. She summoned its power in an instant.
She closed her eyes for only a moment, then opened them again at once.
The god's gaze turned toward a point not far to the north.
"There."
Across the sea, a red storm and driving rain unfurled in an instant.
The red spread on and on into the distance, giving chase.
Before long it reached the very spot where the ship carrying the ceramic figurine had been drifting only moments before.
Great hands rose up out of the sea, one after another. One of them cupped and lifted the glowing Bone Book that had sunk beneath the waves.
Amid the storm and the driving rain, the demon god's gaze burned like thunder and lightning, fixed upon the Bone Book in her grasp.
She studied the Bone Book, and within it she heard a voice still echoing from hundreds of millions of years past.
Even the Scarlet Goddess's voice seemed to tremble now, faint and low.
Once, long ago, it was this very voice that had guided her up onto the Island of Mist and made her Lan's student.
"The Final Chapter of Saint Tito."
"Two hundred million years and more."
"In the last era, I searched for you for nearly a thousand years."
"And then I waited for you two hundred million years more."
"And in the end, you have come back all the same."
Sorrow, agitation, remembrance.
Countless feelings rose up in her all at once, but she quickly reined them back in.
The Scarlet Goddess was no fool. A little trick like the ceramic figurine's could never deceive her.
To her, what the ceramic figurine had done was no better than covering its own ears to steal a bell, fooling no one but itself.
"The ceramic figurine is right there."
"It carries Xiao's treasury upon it, and even Xiao's own contingency."
The Scarlet Goddess's gaze swept the sea and, amid the crashing waves, fixed on a distant shadow. Several ships of Suinhor.
"There."
But to the sailors aboard those ships, there was no god to be seen.
All they saw was a boundless shadow of dark red bearing down on them, layer upon layer of towering waves and driving storm rolling in.
"Storm!" A sailor pointed off into the distance, his voice shrill with fear.
"The storm's caught us!" Panic broke out across the deck.
"Every one of you, stay sharp! Every one of you, get moving!" the boatswain and the sail-riggers shouted, their voices ragged with urgency.
But a few of them sensed that something was off. Within that boundless dark red, within the storm itself, they saw something strange.
They saw flowers blooming upon the sea. Red flowers.
One ability user, soaked to the bone with rain, went suddenly wide-eyed and shouted, "That's not a storm."
"That's a god!"
The sailors busy at their work all froze at once. They looked first at one another, then out at the storm rolling across the sea.
"A god?"
They could not understand it. Why would a god come at them wrapped in a storm like a judgment from the heavens?
Red flowers bloomed across the sea, closing in around the several ships of the Suinhor Royal Navy.
The storm swallowed every direction at once, and terrible shadows could be seen writhing within the rain.
The Scarlet Goddess was not so cruel as to disregard mortal lives entirely. She still held something back.
She did not bring her true body to bear down directly. Instead, she called upon the sealing power of the Blood Mist Cup.
In an instant, the sky and the sea alike turned to red.
Towering wave after towering wave, and a storm that swallowed the world whole.
The entire world seemed to be raining blood, as though the end of days itself had come.
And to the ceramic figurine's eyes, this truly was the end of days.
The last shred of hope the ceramic figurine had clung to shattered completely. It no longer bothered to hide, but stood plainly before the window and let its whole face show.
The ceramic figurine stared out at the storm and the blood-red rain, its face locked stiff, and said, "She's found me."
"I'm going to die."
There was nothing left for the ceramic figurine to do now. No road left to walk.
It stopped looking. There was no point in looking anymore.
The instant the Blood Mist Cup sealed every ship in place, it had already fallen completely into her hands.
The ceramic figurine made its way, step by step, down to the lowest deck of the ship's hold, to that damp, dark place where the strange, singular Teleportation Gate still stood.
Once more the ceramic figurine reached out and pushed the key into the lock.
It twisted the key. Nothing moved.
"It won't open!"
This time there was no feeling left in its voice at all.
By now, perhaps, it no longer expected the door to open. It was only going through the motions, one last mechanical effort.
And now, even that futile effort no longer mattered.
For the first time, the ceramic figurine understood what true despair really meant.
And when despair becomes complete, when there is truly no hope and no road left to walk, the heart is not afraid any more. Instead it simply goes blank.
The ceramic figurine's shape suddenly shifted back into that of a trilobite man, the very first form its nesting dolls had ever taken.
Powerless, it sank to its knees before the Teleportation Gate and stared dumbly at the door scrawled over with chaotic markings.
"I'm going to die?"
"Die, just like this?"
"Master... so even you miscalculated this time?"
"I can't finish the mission now."
Confused words spilled from its mouth. It probably did not even know what it was saying, or what there was left to say at a time like this.
Until now, it had always been the one who drove others to their ruin. Never the one walking toward its own.
"So this is karma?"
"Is it because the God's Moon shone down on me? Did the Creator see me?"
"The end every villain comes to?"
"I'm nothing but a little figurine. Did they really need to raise this much of a storm over me?"
"Go take it out on my master! Why pick on me?"
Bit by bit, even its voice fell away.
For a moment it felt as though it had truly become nothing more than a doll, aware only of the ship rocking beneath the towering waves, of the clutter inside tumbling and sliding violently, while it and the door alone stayed perfectly still.
It could not say why, but a certain dream suddenly rose up in its mind.
It had not been left behind on Ruhe Beast Island.
It had left the Dark Abyss, left the cloud-veiled, treacherous Ruhe Beast Island, and come at last to the Land of Light.
There, deep mountains rose through seas of cloud lit by the sun, and pristine white palaces stood among fountains and pools, where sky messengers played their instruments, clothed in robes of feather.
It remembered the divine child from that dream, radiant as a ten-winged angel, an embodiment of light itself.
The divine child had reached out and touched its head, and told it not to be afraid.
That was a gentleness the God of Original Sin, its own master, had never once shown it.
An expression of pure happiness spread across the ceramic figurine's face, rare as such a thing was.
It had known every kind of feeling before, smugness and wild abandon, arrogance and recklessness.
It had taken the evil within its own heart, magnified it to the very limit, and then let it loose, and the pleasure of that release had been enough to leave anyone intoxicated.
But now, in this very moment, it discovered quite suddenly that something else could leave a person just as drunk, just as lost.
The ceramic figurine knelt on the floor, its head held high.
Like a puppet gone slack and loose.
"If only that dream had been real."
All at once, the door before it began to tremble.
The key was still clutched tight in the ceramic figurine's hand, and yet the door swung open with a great, thunderous crash.
The ceramic figurine froze for a moment, then looked down at the key in its hand.
It was glowing now, casting back the ceramic figurine's own dream.
Understanding broke over it all at once. "So the true key was never in my hand at all. My dream, my own heart, that was the real key to the Teleportation Gate all along."
Light poured out from within the door and swallowed the ceramic figurine whole.
Beyond the door lay a chaotic whirlpool, a warped path leading nowhere in particular, an endless, spiraling coil.
No one could have made out where those twisted paths, that chaotic whirlpool, truly led.
But in the ceramic figurine's eyes there was hope now, shining through.
Beyond that door, it hoped, lay the Land of Light it had longed to reach.
Outside, the storm arrived in full force, and the waves lifted the ship to its highest crest.
A colossal Blood Mist Cup rose out of the depths of the sea, closing around several ships at once and sealing them all within it.
But before that could happen, the Teleportation Gate slammed suddenly shut, shuddered violently, and shrank down to nothing.
In the end it dissolved into a streak of colored light and vanished from the dark, damp hold of the ship.